"How One Typo May Have Just Cost Goldman Sachs $45 Million"
Support for Eric Falkenstein

Nature surprises; human behavior shouldn't surprise

"The Untold Story Of A Venezuelan Dam That Failed, And A Look At What's Happening Now In China".

The region below the Three Gorges Dam has been in severe drought ever since the dam was opened. This headline had me looking again at the correlation between big dams and weather changes. Sure enough, just last February, a collaborative effort by Tennessee Tech, Purdue, U. Georgia, U. Colorado, and Pacific NW Labs confirmed what I had heard 20 years ago. The existence of a dam is directly associated with regional climate change according to the study: (Link)

"Breaking News from NYC: Economics Works".

As the Times reports, the mayor was startled at the result of a four-year-old experiment in housing policy. Said Bloomberg on the radio in April: 

You never know what motivates people. Our theory is that some people have been coming into the homeless system . . . in order to qualify for a program that helps you move out of the homeless system.

In fact, you always know what motivates people — supply and demand.

In this case, the city has supplied big rent subsidies — running close to $1,000 monthly for two years — to “homeless” people so that they could stop being homeless. It follows that more people have duly declared themselves homeless to avail themselves of these subsidies. 

There's a lot about Nature we don't know, but there's no excuse for being surprised when people respond to incentives.

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